Thursday, 20 September 2012

There has never been a better time for your business to use Pinterest

There has never been a better time for small businesses to take advantage of Pinterest as, according to research carried out by Shareaholic, Pinterest has recently moved ahead of Yahoo as the 4th biggest source of traffic on the Internet. Since May, the site has doubled in size with more users than ever taking advantage of the platform.

If you are a run an ecommerce store, you should be looking to take advantage of Pinterest in order to create an extra marketing stream to promote your products to users. If you have never used Pinterest or are unsure what it is, essentially Pinterest is a virtual pinboard for images. When a user visits the site they can click on the search bar and enter a keyword related to images they would like to search for. They will then be shown a list of images that relate to the search parameters. The user then has the option to click on an image to view it in greater detail, comment on the image, like it or repin it.

How can this help my business?

When selling through an online store, the more places you can display your products, the more chance you are going to have of making a sale. Pinterest allows you to add all of your product images to their system, meaning that if a user searches for something that is related to one of your products (e.g. women's shoes) the image of your product will be placed within these search results. If a user clicks on your product image, they can then see your profile as you are the one who originally "Pinned" it to the site. When the user lands on your profile, they are able to not only see all of the other images you have added to Pinterest, but they can also click on one of the external links to visit your store or view other social media accounts.

Even if the user looks at your product but doesn't visit your online store, they may decide to "repin" the image meaning it then appears on their own Pinterest board for a whole new set of people to see. You can see the snowball effect happening here as more and more people will see your product and become aware of your overall brand, increasing the traffic your store is going to generate.

How to get started?

Using Pinterest is pretty straightforward, what you first need to do is visit the Pinterest website and create a new account for free. Once the account has been created, you will then need to click on "Add" at the top of the page and select the image on your computer that you would like to place on the site. If a number of your products fall under one category, such as a specific product range, you could look to create a new board to place them all on. With over 10 million registered users on the site, it is a great opportunity to establish an extra marketing channel for your products, increasing the traffic and sales you will generate.